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have you noticed how the capacity of the media to explain in lay terms such matters as quantum physics, or cosmology, is contracting faster than the universe is expanding? The more mind warping the discoveries the less opportunity there is to fit them into 30 seconds in a news cast, or 300 words in print.

There has been a long running conspiracy of convenience between science reporters and the science being reported to leave out inconvenient time and space consuming explanations, and go for the punch line that best suits the use of the media to lobby for more project funding.

Almost every space story I have written over 50 years has been about projects claiming to ‘discover the origins of the solar system/life on earth/life on Mars/discover the origins of the universe, or recover parts of things like comets because they are as old as the sun, except that we have discovered they aren’t ancient at all.’ None of them were ever designed to achieved those goals. They were brilliant projects, brilliantly misrepresented by the scientists and the reporters because an accurate story would have been incomprehensible to 99.9% of readers or viewers.

Despite the revolutionary technological advance of the printing press in the 15th century, there is precious little economic evidence of its benefits. Using data on 200 European cities between 1450 and 1600, this column finds that economic growth was higher by as much as 60 percentage points in cities that adopted the technology.

Historians argue that the printing press was among the most revolutionary inventions in human history, responsible for a diffusion of knowledge and ideas, “dwarfing in scale anything which had occurred since the invention of writing” (Roberts 1996, p. 220). Yet economists have struggled to find any evidence of this information technology revolution in measures of aggregate productivity or per capita income (Clark 2001, Mokyr 2005). The historical data thus present us with a puzzle analogous to the famous Solow productivity paradox – that, until the mid-1990s, the data on macroeconomic productivity showed no effect of innovations in computer-based information technology.

In recent work (Dittmar 2010a), I examine the revolution in Renaissance information technology from a new perspective by assembling city-level data on the diffusion of the printing press in 15th-century Europe. The data record each city in which a printing press was established 1450-1500 – some 200 out of over 1,000 historic cities (see also an interview on this site, Dittmar 2010b). The research emphasises cities for three principal reasons. First, the printing press was an urban technology, producing for urban consumers. Second, cities were seedbeds for economic ideas and social groups that drove the emergence of modern growth. Third, city sizes were historically important indicators of economic prosperity, and broad-based city growth was associated with macroeconomic growth (Bairoch 1988, Acemoglu et al. 2005).

[UPDATE: Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate has a post on this subject that  -- surprise, surprise -- is perfectly consonant with what I write below.] [UPDATE 2: Andy Revkin has a great post on the representations of the precipitation paper discussed below by scientists and related coverage by the media.]  

Nature published two papers yesterday that discuss increasing precipitation trends and a 2000 flood in the UK.  I have been asked by many people whether these papers mean that we can now attribute some fraction of the global trend in disaster losses to greenhouse gas emissions, or even recent disasters such as in Pakistan and Australia.

I hate to pour cold water on a really good media frenzy, but the answer is "no."  Neither paper actually discusses global trends in disasters (one doesn't even discuss floods) or even individual events beyond a single flood event in the UK in 2000.  But still, can't we just connect the dots?  Isn't it just obvious?  And only deniers deny the obvious, right?

Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.

Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others? I think the usual explanations that we tend to think of - such as the tractability of the subject, or the quality or education of the men drawn into it, or the size of research contracts - are important but inadequate. I have begun to believe that the primary factor in scientific advance is an intellectual one. These rapidly moving fields are fields where a particular method of doing scientific research is systematically used and taught, an accumulative method of inductive inference that is so effective that I think it should be given the name of "strong inference." I believe it is important to examine this method, its use and history and rationale, and to see whether other groups and individuals might learn to adopt it profitably in their own scientific and intellectual work. In its separate elements, strong inference is just the simple and old-fashioned method of inductive inference that goes back to Francis Bacon. The steps are familiar to every college student and are practiced, off and on, by every scientist. The difference comes in their systematic application. Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly: Devising alternative hypotheses; Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly is possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses; Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result; Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain, and so on.

On any new problem, of course, inductive inference is not as simple and certain as deduction, because it involves reaching out into the unknown. Steps 1 and 2 require intellectual inventions, which must be cleverly chosen so that hypothesis, experiment, outcome, and exclusion will be related in a rigorous syllogism; and the question of how to generate such inventions is one which has been extensively discussed elsewhere (2, 3). What the formal schema reminds us to do is to try to make these inventions, to take the next step, to proceed to the next fork, without dawdling or getting tied up in irrelevancies.

The regulatory decree was issued on May 27. The rationale behind the decision? Apparently mentioning social networks like Twitter or Facebook by name goes against a 1992 decree prohibiting surreptitious advertising. Encouraging users to engage with the content creators or give their own feedback is “clandestine advertising” for the social networks themselves.

Christine Kelly, a spokesperson for the CSA, tried to explain the decision by saying it “would be a distortion of competition” to “give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition.”

Matthew Fraser, a Canadian-born journalist who lives and works in Paris, sees this ruling as an example of the “deeply rooted animosity in the French psyche toward Anglo-Saxon cultural domination.” Fraser writes that “sometimes this cultural resentment finds expression in French regulations and laws.”

One is reminded of the pathetic performance of BP CEO Tony Hayward at the US Senate hearings on the Gulf of Mexico oil rig disaster. BP employed 90,000 staff globally. Tony Hayward denied awareness of the cost-cutting obsessions which compromised safety standards across the company. He did not know who approved such dangerous compromises and how such risky operations at sea were supervised. Perhaps he too was betrayed by the people he trusted?

Two high profile CEOs of high profile global corporations, both clueless when internal malpractice explodes into world news? Such lame excuses are unacceptable from corporate chiefs and political leaders. They are given too much power over people, resources and policy to be allowed to slither away.

Mr Murdoch espoused no particular political ideology. Some might call it a lack of principles. If anything was consistent in his media philosophy, it was profitable opportunism. If that meant pandering to the public appetite for ritual sacrifice of the rich and famous, so be it. If that meant offering a megaphone to Christian fanatics of America’s Bible belt and the kooky Tea Party wing of the Republicans, he would oblige. If bare breasts and titillation will outsell rival tabloids, fine.

digital "curators" choose and present things related to a specific topic and context. They "curate", as opposed to "aggregate", which implies plain collecting with little or no value add. Viewed in this context, Google search does the latter, not the former. So, who curates? The Huffington Post, or HuffPo, is one high-profile example and, it appears, a highly-valued one too, going by AOL numbers-crunchers who forked out US$315 million (S$396.9 million) to acquire it. Accolades have also come in for Arianna Huffington's team of contributors and more than 3,000 bloggers - from politicians to celebrities to think-tankers. The website was named second among the 25 best blogs of 2009 by Time magazine, and most powerful blog in the world by The Observer.

By sifting, sorting and presenting news and views - yes, "curating" - HuffPo makes itself useful in an age of too much information and too many opinions. (Strictly speaking, HuffPo is both a creator and curator.) If what HuffPo is doing seems deja vu, it is hardly surprising. Remember the good old "curated" news of the pre-Internet days when newspapers decided what news was published and what we read? Then, the Editor was the Curator with the capital "C".

But with the arrival of the Internet and the uploading of news and views by organisations and netizens, the bits and bytes have turned into a tsunami. Aggregators like Google search threw us some life buoys, using text and popularity to filter the content. But with millions of new articles and videos added to the Internet daily, the "right" content has become that proverbial needle in the haystack. Hence the need for curation.

n the present era with the ubiquitous cellphone camera and rapid distribution channels that are well beyond blogs, such as twittering and Facebook, the old editorial policy is no longer viable. Even Straits Times’ journalists have said as much. If the newspaper does not publish such pictures, others will, and its credibility can only suffer.

Here is the front page for Friday 29 April 2011:

Yes, you will notice that there is a wide-angle photo of the crowd at the Workers’ Party rally the previous night that was held at exactly the same location as the iconic rally in 2006.

The first reductive move made by the writer occurs here: “Singapore is known worldwide for censorship and corporal punishment.” This is the Western media’s favourite trope of our island-nation. A whole political context and dynamic society gets reduced to these two ‘dirty’ words, at least for a ‘Western’ world that prides itself on ‘freedom’ and believes itself to be on a moral high ground because of this veritable self-image. (One could argue that censorship in the ‘West’ exists but in a different form – there, capitalist hegemons control media companies which quite effectively draw the boundaries of public debate.)

The writer first makes the observation that lots of people have started to speak up and speak out against the “clan” that has ruled Singapore for almost 50 years. The People’s Action Party, is for Ms Hodal, not a political party, but a “clan” – which harks back to tribal societies, to tribalism.

Out of all these unsuitable candidates, the writer chose the Arab Spring as the comparative situation of choice for Singapore, despite the fact that the Arab Spring movements did not occur at a time of elections, that much of the physical ‘protesting’ in Singapore was witnessed at political rallies, that there was no bottom-up movement of ‘revolt’. It is the time of the elections; it is a nationally-licensed period of political behaviour and action, for society to perform a cathartic release, for the Bakhtinian carnavalesque to unfold.

The Observer piece then continues by labeling New York City Skeptics as a cult. Now a cult is often defined as “a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.” Hmm, let’s see. Well, NYCS is indeed a small group, and it probably isn’t impossible to find someone somewhere who considers our activities “strange” (though “sinister” would be pushing it). At least as strange as New Yorkers might find a group of people getting together for dinner and talking about things they are interested in — that is, not at all. But “having religious beliefs”? By what sort of distorted conception of religious belief does what Mr. Liu observed that night qualify as such? We are not told, though inquiring minds (apparently not those of Liu’s editors) wish to know.

For Liu “Skepticism starts with the feeling of being under siege by the nonthinking. It becomes Skepticism with the faith that there must be people out there who think like you do — that is, who think.” Well, that’s actually close to the mark, except that we like to think that we go by evidence not faith. But just as my spirits (metaphorically speaking) were beginning to lift a bit, I learned from Mr. Liu that skepticism has recently turned “[in]to something like a distinct, aggressive and almost messianic mentality.” Distinct, yes. Aggressive, maybe, though nothing compared to the aggressiveness of fundamentalists and homeopaths. Messianic? Here we go again with the projected Jesus complex!

Had he done his homework, he would have found out the answer quite readily: until the very same week of the meetup, New Yorkers had been treated to an inane message of the anti-vaccination movement, displayed in full colors on the CBS billboard in Times Square. But that’s a fact that was much less interesting to Mr. Liu than the type of earring I wear (a black diamond, if you need to know).

As many of our readers and podcast listeners have now learned, author, colleague and friend Jennifer Michael Hecht has started an internet campaign on June 22nd using social media to accuse us of plagiarism.

Jennifer apparently believes that we in some form stole her ideas, as presented in her 2008 book, The Happiness Myth

We protested our innocence, emphasizing that the only areas of overlap between her book and our podcast concern a few very common topics about happiness (its treatment by Aristotle and Epicurus, so-called happiness “set points,” and the question of whether wealth is connected to happiness). These, we pointed out, are so fundamental to a discussion of happiness that they are practically mandatory in any treatment of it. It would be odd indeed to have a show on happiness and not mention the research on set points, or on income and happiness — sort of like talking about evolution without mentioning Darwin and natural selection. We also pointed out that said topics make up only a small fraction of those we discussed in the podcast, and of her book for that matter. These ideas are certainly not Jennifer’s original contributions (of which there are many genuine examples in her book); rather, they have been widely discussed in the media, academic journals, and in many popular press books, such as Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Todd Gilbert, Authentic Happiness by Martin E. P. Seligman, and The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt.

The press ad for Cadbury's Bliss range of Dairy Milk chocolate – which ran with the strapline "move over Naomi, there's a new diva in town" – provoked outrage from the supermodel as well as campaigning group Operation Black Vote.Campbell said she was shocked by the ad, while her mother Valerie said she was "deeply upset by this racist advert".Cadbury initially defended the campaign, saying it was intended as a tongue-in-cheek play on her reputation for diva-style tantrums and had nothing to do with her skin colour.However, after taking took legal advice Cadbury withdrew the campaign and made a public apology on its corporate website.

The complainants objected that the ad was racially offensive because it compared a black woman to a bar of chocolate.However, the ASA council said that the ad was "likely to be understood to refer to Naomi Campbell's reputation for 'diva-style' behaviour rather than her race"."On this basis the council decided that the ad was unlikely to be seen as racist or to cause serious or widespread offence," the ASA added.

That has sparked an uproar among some Chinese Internet users, because the unfiltered Web access will be available only to foreign companies, according to the reports. People commenting on social-networking sites have slammed the zone as a throwback to the days of "No dogs and no Chinese allowed,"a reference to how local Chinese were prohibited in the early 20th century from entering certain foreigner communities.

Chongqing Economic and Information Technology Commission, which is overseeing development of the cloud zone, declined to comment on whether the media reports about Web access were accurate. A spokeswoman said the commission continues to "push forward" with the project.

"It goes beyond ironic," he said. "The Chinese government is marketing an uncensored, unfiltered Internet connection as a selling point, while they so blatantly and purposely deny that right to the vast majority of their citizens."

Hari admits to substituting his interviewees’ written words for their spoken words, quoting from their books and pretending that they actually said those words to him over coffee. But that is okay, he says, because his only aim was to reveal “what the subject thinks in the most comprehensible possible words” and to make sure that the reader “understood the point”.

The nub of Hari’s argument is that reality and truth are two different things, that what happens in the real world – in this case a chat between a journalist and some famous author or activist – can be twisted in the name of handing to people a neat, presumably preordained “truth”. It is a cause for concern that more journalists have not been taken aback by such a casual disassociation of truth from fact.

the sad fact is that the BS notion that it is okay to manipulate facts in order to present a Greater Truth is now widespread in the decadent British media. Mark Lawson once wrote a column titled “The government has lied and I am glad”, in which he said it was right for the British authorities and media to exaggerate the threat of AIDS because this “good lie” (his words) helped to improve Britons’ moral conduct. When Piers Morgan was sacked from the Mirror for publishing faked photos of British soldiers urinating on Iraqi prisoners he said it was his “moral duty” to publish the pictures because they spoke to an ugly reality in Iraq. When this month it was discovered that the Syrian lesbian blogger was a fake, some in the media who had fallen for “her” made-up reports said the good thing about the blog is that it helped to “draw attention to a nation’s woes”. And now Hari says it doesn’t matter it he invents a conversation because it helps to express a “vital message” in the “clearest possible words”.

But some lines do have to be drawn if good government is to be possible, just as a zone of privacy in our personal and family lives is crucial to sustaining the relationships that matter most to us.

Some of WikiLeaks’ releases of sensitive material have been perfectly defensible on classic freedom-of-information grounds, exposing abuses that might otherwise have remained concealed. The helicopter gunship killings in Iraq, the corruption of former Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s family, and the paucity of progress in Afghanistan are, by this standard, fair game. None of this makes Julian Assange a Daniel Ellsberg (who 40 years ago leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing US-government thinking on Vietnam). Nor does it put him in the same league with Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading journalist who was murdered after refusing to stop investigating Russian human rights abuses. His stated motives seem too anarchic for that. Sometimes, however, whistles do need to be blown.

But some leaks are indefensible, and at least the sources must expect some punitive reckoning. This category includes leaks that put intelligence sources or other individuals at physical risk (as did some of WikiLeaks’ early releases on Afghanistan and Zimbabwe). It also includes leaks that genuinely prejudice intelligence methods and military operational effectiveness; expose exploratory positions in peace negotiations (invariably helping only spoilers); or disclose bottom lines in trade talks. What is clear in all of these cases is that the stakes are so high that it simply cannot be left to the judgment of WikiLeaks and media outlets to make the necessary calls without consulting relevant officials. Sensibly, US officials facilitated such consultations, on a “without prejudice” basis, in some of the early WikiLeaks cases.